A pioneering team from IBM in Zurich has published single-molecule images so detailed that the type of atomic bonds between their atoms can be discerned. The same team took the first-ever single-molecule image in 2009 and more recently published images of a molecule shaped like the Olympic rings. The new work opens up the prospect of studying imperfections in the "wonder material" graphene or plotting where electrons go during chemical reactions. The images are published in Science. The team, which included French and Spanish collaborators, used a variant of a technique called atomic force microscopy, or AFM. AFM uses a...

A narrative has developed over the past several years that the Republican Party is anti-science. Recently, thanks to the ignorant remarks about rape made by Rep. Todd Akin, the Democrats have seized the opportunity to remind us that they are the true champions of science in America. But is it really true? No. As we thoroughly detail in our new book, "Science Left Behind," Democrats are willing to throw science under the bus for any number of pet ideological causes – including anything from genetic modification to vaccines. Consider California’s Proposition 37, which would require genetically modified food to carry...

Speed of light may have changed recently 19:00 30 June 04 The speed of light, one of the most sacrosanct of the universal physical constants, may have been lower as recently as two billion years ago - and not in some far corner of the universe, but right here on Earth. The controversial finding is turning up the heat on an already simmering debate, especially since it is based on re-analysis of old data that has long been used to argue for exactly the opposite: the constancy of the speed of light and other constants. A varying speed of light...

Astroboffins have spotted a galaxy cluster that's breaking all the cosmic rules, including coming back to life to spawn stars at an enormous rate. The Phoenix cluster is spewing out the celestial bodies at the highest rate ever observed for the middle of a galaxy cluster; it's the most powerful producer of X-rays of any known cluster; it's one of the most massive of its kind; and the rate of hot gas cooling in the central regions is the largest ever observed. According to the scientists, the cluster is "experiencing a massive starburst" that's forming the equivalent of 740 Suns...

Scientists at CERN's Large Hadron Collider say they just temporarily created the hottest man-made temperature by colliding two lead ions. According to a source working on the project, the collision sprung loose a plasma "soup" of sub-atomic gluons and quarks at an estimated temperature of 5.5-trillion-degrees Celsius. We won't know just how hot the plasma was for at least a few weeks because the measurements are very delicate and have to be converted to degrees. The consensus seems to be that it will shatter the previous record, which was about 4 trillion degrees.The craziest thing is that this might not...

A group of physicists at the University of Glasgow is claiming a first: taking photos of entangled photons. In this paper in Nature (hooray for free access!), they explain that their 201 x 201 pixel images captured around 2,500 different entangled quantum states. The entangled photons were imaged using different lens configurations to capture correlations of position and momentum – the characteristics (to shorthand Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle) that mutually preclude excessive knowledge about a given quantum system. From the 100,000 images taken by their setup (pictured*), the scientists say they were able to observe 2,500 states which they described as...

ANN ARBOR — Astrophysicists have detected, for the first time, the oscillating signal that heralds the last gasps of a star falling victim to a previously dormant supermassive black hole. Led by researchers at the University of Michigan, the team documented the event with the Suzaku and XMM-Newton orbiting X-ray telescopes. These instruments picked up semi-regular blips in the light from a numerically-named galaxy 3.9 billion light years away in the northern constellation Draco the dragon. The blips, scientifically known as “quasiperiodic oscillations,” occurred steadily every 200 seconds, but occasionally disappeared. Such signals have often been detected at smaller black...

The matter-eating beast at the center of the Milky Way may actually account for Earth's existence and habitabilityAdapted from Gravity’s Engines: How Bubble-Blowing Black Holes Rule Galaxies, Stars, and Life in the Cosmos, by Caleb ScharfOur existence in this place, this microscopic corner of the cosmos, is fleeting. with utter disregard for our wants and needs, nature plays out its grand acts on scales of space and time that are truly hard to grasp. Perhaps all that we can look to for real solace is our endless capacity to ask questions and seek answers about the place we find ourselves...

In 1964, physicist Peter Higgs of the University of Edinburgh proposed that the infant universe (as in, perhaps a trillionth of a second old) experienced... a phase transition. In much the way an iron bar can suddenly become a magnet when cooled below a certain temperature, space itself acquired a new feature. Instead of a magnetic field, space was filled with a new forcelike field -- since named for Higgs. Other physicists worked out similar scenarios at about the same time, and later work showed how the Higgs phase transition could explain the distinct identities of two of nature's basic...

Notes from a parallel universe Inside the X-files at the University of California at Berkeley, the line between theory and fantasy, science and supposition, starts to dissolve. The authors of these dissertations are obsessed—and scientists are nearly as obsessed with them Eleven years ago Eugene Sittampalam was sitting in a hotel room on the Libyan coast when he stumbled, as if by fate, on the unified field theory of physics. "I was on an engineering project at the time, with hardly any social life," he says. "I would retire to my room after dinner. I would switch on the radio,...

The Telegraph ^ | 3/27/2010 | Andrew Osborn in Moscow and Olga Krepysheva in St. Petersburg

Inside the world of Grigory Perelman: the man who solved the world's toughest maths problem proves to be a puzzle himself. He has been called "the cleverest man in the world" and shook academia to its foundations when he announced he had solved a fiendish mathematical problem that had baffled the planet's best brains for a century. Yet Grigory Perelman, a 43-year-old Russian mathematician, has consciously spurned plaudits and wealth to subsist like a hermit. He lives in a 2-bedroom flat with his elderly mother in a dilapidated Soviet-era tower block in St. Petersburg, while neighbours complain that his own...

Baffled by the expansion of the universe? You're not alone. Even astronomers frequently get it wrong. The expansion of the universe may be the most important fact we have ever discovered about our origins. You would not be reading this article if the universe had not expanded. Human beings would not exist. Cold molecular things such as life-forms and terrestrial planets could not have come into existence unless the universe, starting from a hot big bang, had expanded and cooled. The formation of all the structures in the universe, from galaxies and stars to planets and Scientific American articles, has...

Scientists preparing to fire up the world's largest atom smasher are being flooded with phone calls and emails – even death threats – from people worried that the Large Hadron Collider, when activated, will obliterate planet Earth.

A simulation of the early universe using string theory may explain why space has three observable spatial dimensions instead of nine. The leading mathematical explanation of physics goes beyond modern particle theory by positing tiny bits of vibrating string as the fundamental basis of matter and forces. String theory also requires that the universe have six or more spatial dimensions in addition to the ones observed in everyday life. Explaining how those extra dimensions are hidden is a central challenge for string theorists... In the simulation, the universe starts off as a tiny blob of strings that is symmetric in...

(25) Millenium simulation from Volker Springel et al., from the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics. Â“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.Â” -Stephen Hawking The Universe is a vast, seemingly unending marvel of existence. Over the past century, weÂ’ve learned that the Universe stretches out beyond the billions of stars in our Milky Way, out across billions of light years, containing close to a trillion galaxies all told.Image credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI) and the HUDF Team. And yet, thatÂ’s just the observableÂ Universe! There are good reasons to believe that the...

Astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope have discovered the oldest known spiral galaxy, a 10.7-billion-year-old anomaly that by all rights shouldn't exist. The galaxy was present in the early universe, about 3 billion years after the Big Bang, at a time when galaxies were still forming and normally looked clumpy and irregular. … In fact, it is a so-called grand design spiral galaxy, which has prominent, well-formed spiral arms. "The fact that this galaxy exists is astounding," Law said. "Current wisdom holds that such grand design spiral galaxies didn't exist at such an early time in the history of the...

As the author of these columns describing cutting edge physics and astronomy, I get quite a few letters and E-mail from readers who are more interested in ?over-the-edge physics and astronomy?. One recurring theme is various alternatives to the standard model of Big Bang cosmology. Perhaps the universe is not expanding; it?s just that light ?gets tired? on its path from far away and loses some of its energy. Perhaps quasars are closer than we think, particularly since some of them appear to be linked to closer galaxies. Perhaps relativity is wrong, and it?s the speed of light that is...

Reprinted from ScienceDaily Magazine ...Source: NASA/Marshall Space Flight Center Date Posted: Thursday, August 01, 2002Web Address: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2002/08/020801080835.htm Chandra Discovers "Rivers Of Gravity" That Define Cosmic Landscape NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has discovered part of an intergalactic web of hot gas and dark matter that contains most of the material in the universe. The hot gas, which appears to lie like a fog in channels carved by rivers of gravity, has been hidden from view since the time galaxies formed. "The Chandra observations, together with ultraviolet observations, are a major advance in our understanding of how the universe evolved over the last 10 billion...

EnlargeGalaxy ESO 243-49, about 300 million light-years away, is home to the newly found black hole. Credit: NASA, ESA and S. Farrell (U. Sydney) (Phys.org) -- Over the years, cosmologists have found ample evidence of just two kinds of black holes: stellar mass black holes and supermassive black holes. The former are considered small by most standards, just several times the weight of our sun; the latter, as their name implies, huge and as heavy as millions of our sun combined. Not so easy to find have been those that lie somewhere in-between, and because of that, their existence...

Boffins' first glimpse of the structural framework of our universe Higgs, Schmiggs... When that infinitesimal speck was sucking up all the journalistic oxygen on Independence Day, another momentous scientific discovery was also being announced: the first observation of filaments of dark matter, the stuff that forms the "skeleton" of our universe. Invisible, inexplicable dark matter makes up the vast majority of the mass of our universe. All the matter that we can see – stars, galaxies, planets, haggis, Michele Bachman – total only between 4 and 5 per cent of our universe's mass. The rest? There's dark matter and dark...

Full title: Serious blow to dark matter theories? New study finds mysterious lack of dark matter in Sun's neighborhood The most accurate study so far of the motions of stars in the Milky Way has found no evidence for dark matter in a large volume around the Sun. According to widely accepted theories, the solar neighbourhood was expected to be filled with dark matter, a mysterious invisible substance that can only be detected indirectly by the gravitational force it exerts. But a new study by a team of astronomers in Chile has found that these theories just do not fit...

Tevatron presents strong evidence Higgs boson was observed, but LHC needed to provide final verificationTomorrow, while America celebrates July 4, mankind worldwide may celebrate a separate momentous event -- the discovery of the legendary Higgs boson. I. Riding Into the Sunset -- Tevatron Goes Out With a Bang The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) will tomorrow hold a special press conference at 9 a.m. The event will provide an update to the world on the progress in the search for the critical particle using the Large Hadron Collider, the largest and most expensive laboratory apparatus in history. Many physicists...

GENEVA: Scientists at Europe's CERN research center have found a new subatomic particle, a basic building block of the universe, which appears to be the boson imagined and named half a century ago by theoretical physicist Peter Higgs. "We have reached a milestone in our understanding of nature," CERN director general Rolf Heuer told a gathering of scientists and the world's media near Geneva on Wednesday. "The discovery of a particle consistent with the Higgs boson opens the way to more detailed studies, requiring larger statistics, which will pin down the new particle's properties, and is likely to shed light...

Physicists say they have all but proven that the "God particle" exists. They have a footprint and a shadow, and the only thing left is to see for themselves the elusive subatomic particle believed to give all matter in the universe size and shape. Scientists at the world's biggest atom smasher plan to announce Wednesday that they have nearly confirmed the primary plank of a theory that could restructure the understanding of why matter has mass, which combines with gravity to give an object weight. The focus of the excitement is the Higgs boson, a subatomic particle long sought by...

The US particle collider Tevatron has jumped in just ahead of the Large Hadron Collider's results announcement this week to say that their machine has found the "strongest indication to date" of the God particle. The LHC's baby American cousin stopped bashing particles off each other back in March 2001 but the scientists have kept crunching the numbers from the 500 trillion collisions produced to wring the last drops of data out. Today, the boffins said their data "strongly point toward the existence of the Higgs boson" but we're still not there yet. “It is a real cliffhanger," the DZero...

GENEVA (AP) — Scientists working at the world's biggest atom smasher plan to announce Wednesday that they have gathered enough evidence to show that the long-sought "God particle" answering fundamental questions about the universe almost certainly does exist. But after decades of work and billions of dollars spent, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, say they aren't quite ready to say they've "discovered" the particle. Instead, experts familiar with the research at CERN's vast complex on the Swiss-French border say that the massive data they have obtained will essentially show the footprint of the key particle...

Scientists at Cern will announce that the elusive Higgs boson 'God Particle' has been found at a press conference next week, it is believed. Five leading theoretical physicists have been invited to the event on Wednesday - sparking speculation that the particle has been discovered. Scientists at the Large Hadron Collider are expected to say they are 99.99 per cent certain it has been found - which is known as 'four sigma' level.

GENEVA (AP) -- Scientists working at the world's biggest atom smasher plan to announce Wednesday that they have gathered enough evidence to show that the long-sought "God particle" answering fundamental questions about the universe almost certainly does exist. But after decades of work and billions of dollars spent, researchers at the European Organization for Nuclear Research, or CERN, aren't quite ready to say they've "discovered" the particle.

Has the Higgs boson finally been detected? It's almost gotten to the point that if a discovery of some sort doesn't come out of next week's update on the multibillion-dollar subatomic search, it'll be a big surprise. But how far will the announcement go, and what will it mean for the future of physics? To refresh your memory, the Higgs boson is the only fundamental subatomic particle predicted by theory but not yet detected. It's thought to play a role in endowing some particles, such as the W and Z boson, with mass ... while leaving other particles, such as...

A NASA-sponsored researcher at the University of Iowa has developed a way for spacecraft to hunt down hidden magnetic portals in the vicinity of Earth. These portals link the magnetic field of our planet to that of the sun. Excellent video on the science of our magnetosphere and how we are just learning about field reversal that open and close between earth and the sun.

June 10, 2012 Image of the Day: Evidence of a Past Universe? Circular Patterns in the Cosmic Microwave Background Stephen Hawking has said: "We should look for evidence of a collision with another universe in our distant Past." Some experts believe that what we call the universe may only be one of many. Is there any conceivable way that we could ever detect and study other universes if they exist? Is it even falsifiable? This was a key question Hawking was was asked in an interview with the BBC. "Our best bet for a theory of everything...

People often say that time speeds up as we age, but if the latest scientific theory is true the opposite could well be the case. The radical theory by academics suggests that time itself could be slowing down - and may eventually grind to a halt altogether. The latest mind-bending findings - put forward by researchers working at two Spanish universities - proposes that we have all been fooled into thinking the universe is expanding. In fact, they say, time itself is slowing down until eventually, in billions of years time, it will cease altogether. Although the findings might sound...

Got mass? Scientists observe electrons become both heavy and speedy Electrons moving in certain solids can behave as if they are a thousand times more massive than free electrons, but at the same time act as superconductors. A new study led by Princeton scientists shows that this happens because of a process known as quantum entanglement that determines the mass of electrons moving in a crystal. The discovery can help improve understanding of how certain materials become superconducting, which may have applications in areas such as power network efficiency and computing speed. Credit: the Yazdani Group A Princeton University-led team...

Two years ago several of my Sci Am colleagues and I had an intense email exchange over a period of weeks, trying to figure out what to make of a new paper by string theorist Erik Verlinde. I don’t think I’ve ever been so flummoxed by physicists’ reactions to a paper. Mathematically it could hardly have been simpler—the level of middle-school algebra for the most part. Logically and physically, it was a head-hurter. I couldn’t decide whether it was profound or trite. The theorists we consulted said they couldn’t follow it, which we took as a polite way of saying...

Eight months after the multinational Opera research team caused an uproar among physicists with its findings that some neutrinos appeared to travel faster than light, its findings have been officially refuted. CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, on Friday said that four experiments have found that neutrinos actually travel no faster than the speed of light. Opera's original measurements can be attributed to a faulty element of its experiment's fiber optic timing system, CERN said. The findings were announced at the 25th International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, Japan, by CERN research director Sergio Bertolucci. Life...

Physics on the Fringe: Smoke Rings, Circlons, and Alternative Theories of Everything by Margaret Wertheim Walker, 323 pp., $27.00 Pierpont Morgan Library/Art Resource An engraving by William Blake from The Song of Los, 1795 Physics on the Fringe describes work done by amateurs, people rejected by the academic establishment and rejecting orthodox academic beliefs. They are often self-taught and ignorant of higher mathematics. Mathematics is the language spoken by the professionals. The amateurs offer an...

Teleportation, sci-fi-y as it sounds, is actually not fictional or even new; two years ago, Chinese physicists broke the then-current record for quantum teleportation by teleporting photons over 10 miles. But a new effort from that same team demolishes that record, beaming the photons over 97 kilometers. The physicists, working from the University of Science and Technology of China in Shanghai, have again taken advantage of quantum entanglement for the purposes of moving an object from one place to another without ever moving in the space between. According to Technology Review, "The idea is not that the physical object is...

Inside Science Minds presents an ongoing series of guest columnists and personal perspectives presented by scientists, engineers, mathematicians, and others in the science community showcasing some of the most interesting ideas in science today.(ISM) -- Our universe may exist inside a black hole. This may sound strange, but it could actually be the best explanation of how the universe began, and what we observe today. It's a theory that has been explored over the past few decades by a small group of physicists including myself. Successful as it is, there are notable unsolved questions with the standard big bang theory,...

A re-analysis of radio telescope observations from three countries has yielded a surprising result: nearby galaxies harbour one-third more hydrogen than had previously been estimated. While nothing like enough matter to solve physics’ “dark matter” problem, the work by CSIRO astronomer Dr Robert Braun (chief scientist at the agency’s Astronomy and Space Science division in Sydney) also helps explain why the rate of star formation has slowed down. While there’s more hydrogen than astronomers had thought, its distribution makes star formation more difficult. Andromeda – the galaxy headed for a catastrophic collision with our own in about four billion years...

Precocious young physicist Aisha Mustafa just patented a new system that could propel spacecrafts to the final frontier without using a drop of fuel. In short her system taps one of the odder facets of quantum theory, which posits that space isn't really a vacuum. It's really filled with particles and anti-particles that exist for infinitesimally small periods of time before destroying each other. Mustafa thinks she can harness them to create propulsion, resulting in space craft that need little-to-no fuel to maneuver around in space. Fast Company reports: Mustafa invented a way of tapping this quantum effect via what's...

May 25, 2012 By Cindy Weiss EnlargeThomas C. Blum, Associate Professor, Physics. Credit: Daniel Buttrey/UConn (Phys.org) -- An international collaboration of scientists, including Thomas Blum, associate professor of physics, is reporting in landmark detail the decay process of a subatomic particle called a kaon – information that may help answer fundamental questions about how the universe began. Ads by GoogleSix Sigma — Black Belt - Get Trained & Six Sigma Certified. Flexible, Top Program 100% online. - www.VillanovaU.com/SixSigmaThe research, reported online in the March 30, 2012 Physical Review Letters, used breakthrough techniques on some of the world’s fastest supercomputers to...

Looking at the fundamental properties of matter can take some serious computing grunt. Take the calculation needed to help understand kaon decay – a subatomic particle interaction that helps explain why the universe is made of matter rather than anti-matter: it soaked up 54 million processor hours on Argonne National Laboratory’s BlueGene/P supercomputer near Chicago, along with time on Columbia University’s QCDOC machine, Fermi National Lab’s USQCD (the US Center for Quantum Chromo-Dynamic) Ds cluster, and the UK’s Iridis cluster at the University of Southampton and the DIRAC facility. The reason so much iron was needed: the kaon decay spans...

A musical investigation into the nature of atoms and subatomic particles, the jiggly things that make up everything we see. Featuring Morgan Freeman, Stephen Hawking, Michio Kaku, Brian Cox, Richard Feynman, and Frank Close. "The Quantum World" is the eleventh installment in the ongoing Symphony of Science music video series. Track back to source website: Symphony of Science

Whether you're a Trekkie or not, you have to admit that there's some sense of wonder toexploring the stars and trying to find life on distant planets. Of course, the U.S.S. Enterprise is a fictional ship, but have you ever put in the thought as to what it would take to actually build it, and when we could get it done if we really put in the effort? The man behind the well-researched site buildtheenterprise.org has, and he's determined that a fully functional Enterprise is only 20 years away if we put in the effort.

Tested takes a trip to Reed College in Portland, Oregon. This isn't just where Steve Jobs went to school, it's the home of the Reed Research Reactor, the only nuclear reactor in the world that's operated by undergraduate students. We learn how the reactor works and get a demonstration in sample irradiation. It's real science!

The so-called Republican brain, with its deep resistance to yielding before mere scientific evidence, has played an indispensable role in the making of modern science, long before the emergence of the Grand Old Party. A new term of political opprobrium has been loosed upon the world: anti-science. Like many terms of abuse, it is easier to convey its meaning by an illustration than by a rigorous definition. For example, â€śIf those damn Republicans werenâ€™t so anti-science, we might have a chance of dealing with global warming.â€ť Hereâ€™s another example: â€śThose damn Republicans are so anti-science that they want to see...

Explanation: What is all this fuss about the Higgs boson? The physics community is abuzz that a fundamental particle expected by the largely successful Standard Model of particle physics may soon be found by the huge Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN in Europe. The term boson refers to a type of fundamental particle with similarities to the photon, while Higgs refers to Peter Higgs, a physicist who among others published research predicting the mechanism through which such a particle might act. The above animated cartoon explains in humorous but impressive detail why the Higgs boson is expected, and one...